A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Wednesday, November 18, 2015

PETER PAN, TINKER BELL, AND ME

Many of us will recall the moment in J. M. Barrie's classic
play, Peter Pan, when the little
fairy, Tinker Bell, is dying from the poison she has drunk to save Peter.Tink is represented not by an actress but by
a bright spot of light reflected from an off-stage mirror.As the light begins to fade, Peter breaks the
fourth wall and turns to the children in the audience, "Do you believe in fairies?Say quick that you believe.If you believe, clap your hands."The children always clap, the light
brightens, and the play can go on.

Last week, the children did not clap, and Tinker Bell
died.The play has been cancelled.

Permit me to explain.

After teaching a graduate/advanced undergraduate course
lastsemester in the UNC Philosophy
Department on "Karl Marx's Critique of Capitalism," I talked with the
Chair of the Department about teaching a quite different course next semester
at the same level on the theme "Ideological Critique."I conceived this course as a more sophisticated
and demanding version of a course I taught at UMass twenty-five years ago.It was agreed that I would teach the course,
and I began to prepare.I am going to
describe the course in some detail, for a reason that will become clearpresently.

The course is organized into three 3-4 week segments
followed by a two week coda.In the first
segment, I carefully take the students through Karl Mannheim's great classic
work, Ideology and Utopia.This introduces them to the concept of
ideological critique and provides the frame for what follows.In the next segment, we read a work devoted
to the study of a San-speaking people who live in the Kalahari Desert in
Southern Africa.These people, the Zhu,
were the object of an elaborate ethnographical study carried out by a famous
anthropologist, Richard Lee, and a large team of associates.Lee et al. construe the Zhu as a
pre-historical holdover from a time when human beings lived by hunting and
gathering and foraging.Edwin Wilmsen's
book Land Filled With Flies, which is
the major text for this segment of my course, is a theoretically complex,
highly detailed, scathing ideological critique not only of the work of Lee but
beyond that of the field of Ethnography itself.Inasmuch as Wilmsen draws brilliantly on categories of analysis
developed by Marx, the book actually constitutes a fascinating continuation of
my course of Marx.

The third major segment of the course switches fields and
topics abruptly and turns to African-American literature.Henry Louis Gates' most important book, The Signifying Monkey, develops a
literary critical theory of African-American literature rooted in the religious
and oral traditions of West Africa.The
book is also, in my judgment, a brilliant and very angry ideological critique
of Literary Criticism as practiced by the icons of that field -- Jacques
Derrida, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and others.

The coda is devoted to an essay by Edward Said, whose work virtually
created the field of Post-Colonial Studies.The essay is a very surprising reading of one of Jane Austen's novels, Mansfield Park.With the novel and the essay, I have the
students watch a film of the novel made by the Canadian director Patricia
Rozema, who was clearly influenced by Said's essay.

And that is the course.During my "vacation" from this blog, I spent endless hours in
Paris very carefully re-reading the Gates and the Wilmsen, taking more than
twenty-five pages of detailed notes.I
had forgotten how much there was to talk about in each book, and I wondered
whether one semester would be enough time for everything I want to say.

UNC, as a result of a miscalculation of their admissions
"yield," admitted twice as many graduate students as usual this year
-- twelve instead of six.I thought
therefore that there might be a good turnout for the course -- more even than
the six Philosophy grad students who signed up for the Marx course.Last week, from Paris, I sent an e-mail to
the departmental secretary to find out about enrolment.Not a
single graduate student enrolled in the course.

The children did not clap.I cancelled the course.

I spent a bad twenty-four hours after that, I freely confess,
but then my natural good spirits returned.I finished working through the last sixty pages of the Wilmsen, even
though it was for naught.But then I
began to think.I honestly believe that this
is a truly great course, and I am loathe to let it simply die, clapping or no.Could I perhaps teach it -- in some sense of
"teach" -- on my blog.

Here is what I am thinking.Perhaps some of you will write comments and tell me whether what I am
proposing makes any sense.Next
semester, starting some time in January, I will post a series of extended
essays, two or three a week, in the form of lectures.I will invite interested parties to buy and
read the books and follow along.If there
are five or eight folks who are enthusiastic enough to "take" the
course, I will invite them to write essays on the different segments and send
them to me.I will read the essays and
comment on them, just as if they were in my class. The only thing I will not do
is append grades.

I would love it. Like other respondents, my chief concern is time, but I will try. I suspect that you yourself would enjoy doing it, which might make it all the more worthwhile. I have recently been reading some ethnographic studies so I would like to read a critique of ethnography in general. It also never hurts to revisit Mannheim.

Sign me up. I'm already signed up for the class Dissent in America beginning in January at my undergraduate alma mater Temple University taught by historian Ralph Young who recently published a book by the same name. I look forward to it.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.